


Arctic

by Jane St Clair (3jane)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Disturbing Themes, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-05
Updated: 2011-08-05
Packaged: 2017-10-22 06:29:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/234920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3jane/pseuds/Jane%20St%20Clair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lupin is Dumbledore's ambassador.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Arctic

  
Care of Magical Creatures was a good, basic class, and Defence Against the  
Dark Arts taught him a lot.  In becoming a professor of Defence Against the  
Dark Arts, he'd managed to teach himself rather more.  Being a werewolf did,  
in the end, give him a certain sight into things four-legged and beyond the  
pale.  All very good, but until he went to Russia he hadn't any idea of the  
fascination offered by a bear in armour.

The witches of the tundra were a completely different bunch than he was used  
to.  None had attended Hogwarts, and if he mentioned Durmstrang they spit at  
his feet.  They were amazonian, half-naked in the cold, ethereally beautiful,  
and almost universally sapphic.  Gorgeous, smoky lesbians of the frozen  
north.

They let him into their homes, though.  They knew him for a Dark Creature on  
sight, welcomed him anyway, showed him paths he'd never have found alone.    
Nights he talked with their leaders, curled into soft feathers and the winter  
hair of reindeer.  None of those women would promise help against Voldemort,  
but he knew they'd side against the Dark Lord before they'd bow to him.  He  
thought Dumbledore should have sent a female ambassador.

Still.  It was only the beginning of the trip.  His broomstick was utterly  
unsuited for the arctic winds, and he couldn't apparate if he didn't know  
where he was going.  In the end, he waited for the full moon. The wolfsbane  
Snape had brewed before he left was going off, but it still worked, after a  
fashion.  Well enough that his mind was still in his skin when his body  
changed.  It gave him three days to run.  In the deep midwinter, sunrise never  
came, but moonset brought him back to himself, naked in the snow.  He burrowed  
into banks, lined them with the spells he could remember and slept.  Ran again  
at moonrise.

He was almost out of Russia, running north towards the ice, when he met the  
Armoured Bears.

These were nothing like the bear-myths he'd read at school.  Nothing about  
them was anthropomorphic.  They were bears, moving like bears, in a world to  
which they were adapted.  Only, their fur lay under heavy, gorgeously-crafted  
metal shields.

They knew him before he'd shifted back.  He stood in front of them for an hour  
before the change came.  Afterward, he stood naked in the snow.

He walked among them, when they accepted him, wrapped in spells instead of  
clothing.  The bloody meat they offered at dinner set the wolf growling, and  
he ate anyway.  Sat in their councils and listened more than he spoke.  Walked  
among them.  Bears bowed their heads and growled, told him they could smell  
Dementors on his skin.  He didn't know where they'd encountered the Dementors,  
but the hatred there was pure and permanent.

That was the key.  A dozen tumbled nights in Sirius' arms, wrapped in the    
warmth of the Canary Islands.  The coast of Africa smelled more or less as he  
remembered it, even far out to sea.  Sirius smelled completely different.    
Fear and fury all over him.  Still necessary to him in ways that twisted  
Lupin's heart.

He wondered, how much damage to an aged boy-wizard was worth a hard alliance  
with the Bears?  He didn't have hard promises, yet, but they were coming, in  
whatever form the Bears offered such things.

What came, finally, was one of the younger Bears, to his cave in the night.

The world was made of ice, and he was only marginally used to sleeping in it.    
The spells he cast around himself for warmth were exhausting, so soon after  
the moon change.  In the end, the bears brought him skins of things they'd  
killed and eaten, and he cured them magically.  Laid in them and smelled prey.    
The bears approached him carefully when he was sleeping, and he suspected it  
was more because he smelled like food than out of any particular type of  
respect.

The bears themselves made nests of their own fur and summer grasses.  Their  
sleeping caves smelled nothing like his own.

He hadn't known, though, until he walked through the hive of rock and ice to  
Gluyar's cave.  No human had come into that room before, and certainly none  
had stretched out in the pressed belly-fur on the floor.  He knew that other  
wizards had laid down with bears, because the tundra witches had stories, but  
no one had done so in the bear's home darkness.  So here, at least, he was the  
first to be spread open and slicked with alien fluids and fucked by something  
so very alien.

He remembered sex from the times he'd been in wolf-shape, and this was nothing  
like that.

He curled into the fur later, aching and wanting.  The bear wrapped itself  
around him and growled softly until he slept.  Its smell was all over him.

The witches knew, when he walked out of the darkness at moonset, a month  
later.  He thought of going back to Hogwarts, just to make Dumbledore read the  
new accord off his skin.

The last time the moon went up, he ran in the dark for a long, long way.

 

 

[2 May 2003]


End file.
